Resolving Who Owns What Land Lies at Heart of Zimbabwe’s Future

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An abandoned homestead in Mazowe, Zimbabwe, in November. Villagers were harassed by the police for years because Grace Mugabe wanted their land.CreditZinyange Auntony/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MAZOWE, Zimbabwe — The police first came early one morning five years ago, catching villagers by surprise as they worked in their fields. As hundreds of anti-riot police officers jumped down from their vehicles, their commander issued the villagers an order.

“He said that mother and daughter Grace Mugabe wanted this place,” recalled a village leader, Denboy Chaparadza. “So you better move away.”

The villagers understood right away: Grace Mugabe, the wife of Robert Mugabe, who was ousted from power in November after 37 years as Zimbabwe’s leader, and their daughter, Bona, coveted the villagers’ land. The Mugabes already owned property and businesses in Mazowe, about 25 miles north of Harare, the capital, and they were eager to expand.

Before the villagers could object, the police, armed with sticks and iron bars, demolished their modest houses. “Every house,” Mr. Chaparadza said. “They left us out in the open. We felt betrayed.”

Despite the destruction, most villagers refused to leave, and over the coming years, they would continue to resist in the face of growing pressure, including beatings by the police. In 2014 and 2015, the police returned, tearing down homes under construction and destroying their crops of corn, nuts and beans.

Volunteer lawyers helped delay the villagers’ eviction in the courts even as the police intensified their campaign on the ground. Starting last March, the police began coming nearly every day to harass the residents.

One reason the 146 families who lived in Mazowe felt betrayed by their leader was that they themselves had seized the land from a white farmer in 2000, under Mr. Mugabe’s fast-track land reform program. Now, they risked losing everything to his wife and daughter: 3,100 acres of prime land for farming and cattle ranching that abuts a lake and gold mines.

As Zimbabwe embarks on its post-Mugabe era, the unresolved issue of land ownership remains at the heart of the nation’s future, just as it was at the time of independence, in 1980.

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Members of a family in Mazowe, Zimbabwe, whose dwelling was destroyed by the police in 2015.CreditTsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated Press

In the talks leading to independence from white-minority rule, Mr. Mugabe was pressured into an agreement that left land ownership unsettled. In what was and remains an agricultural economy, the nation’s most productive farmland was in the hands of a few thousand white settlers.

Resolving the land issue, including compensating white farmers whose properties were later seized, is critical to repairing relations with Western nations and international lenders, which have been virtually frozen for nearly a generation. The new government desperately needs Western assistance to revive the nation’s moribund economy.

Determining who owns the land is a necessary step to development and democratization in Zimbabwe. Nearly all Zimbabweans who benefited from Mr. Mugabe’s land reform policy lack titles, or legal ownership of their property — leaving them at the mercy of the politically powerful.

But Mr. Mnangagwa said that he was “committed to compensating those farmers from whom land was taken.” In addition, he said that “complex issues of land tenure will have to be addressed” so as “to ensure finality and closure to the ownership and management of this key resource.”

Government officials highlighted the case of a white Zimbabwean, Rob Smart, who was allowed to return to his farm in December. But Mr. Smart had lost his farm only six months earlier amid factional fighting inside the ruling party and regained it after Mr. Mnangagwa’s side emerged victorious, not through any policy change.

So far, the government has yet to take any concrete steps toward compensation or even to meet with representatives of the thousands of former landowners, said Ben Freeth, a leader of white Zimbabweans whose farms were seized.

Mr. Mnangagwa was indicating his support for the tentative steps taken by the Zimbabwean government in the past few years. In order to qualify for badly needed loans from international creditors like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, government officials had begun mapping the 6,000 farms that were seized after the fast-track program started in the late 1990s. The government even held workshops on the compensation of white farmers.

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Loneviance Sosono, 13, in her family’s demolished house last November in Mazowe.CreditZinyange Auntony/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Government and Western officials, however, had remained skeptical that any final decision could be taken as long as Mr. Mugabe held power.

It remains unclear whether Mr. Mnangagwa will follow through on his recent promises. As Mr. Mugabe’s longtime right-hand man, the new president is believed to have overseen the former leader’s often violent land policy.

Land also remains a tool of political control, one that Mr. Mnangagwa and other leaders of the governing ZANU-PF party have never shown a willingness to relinquish.

“The rhetoric was encouraging, but we wait to see the practice,” Moses Donsa Nkomo, a lawyer with Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, who represented the villagers in Mazowe, said of Mr. Mnangagwa’s pledge. “I’m a bit skeptical. That is the system that has kept them in power until now.”

High-ranking officials expelled from the party had their land seized, or suffered repeated incursions into their properties by party youths. The threat of losing their farms led some officials to stay in ZANU-PF, instead of decamping to new opposition parties.

“The land reform program was correct, but it was not implemented correctly,” said Temba P. Mliswa, who was expelled from ZANU-PF in 2014 and is now an independent lawmaker.

Mr. Mliswa — who managed to keep his 2,000-acre farm despite party youths who invaded and destroyed his property — said the ruling party uses land to “control you.” In addition, he and many other critics have pointed out that many senior politicians and the politically connected have more than one farm, in violation of Mr. Mugabe’s land policy.

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Florence Gurure next to her destroyed grass-hut dwelling in Mazowe in 2015.CreditTsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated Press

Since Mr. Mugabe’s fall from power, the raids in Mazowe have ceased, and the police no longer bar visitors from the single dirt road that leads to the property, which locals still call by its colonial name, Arnolds Farm.

But the destruction brought by the police officers — who variously told the villagers that Mrs. Mugabe and her daughter wanted to build a university named after the president on the land and to erect a memorial to him — is still visible.

The police tore down two mud-brick homes belonging to Angeline Zvirikunzeno and her adult daughter, Rutendo Maluleke.

Standing next to a pile of bricks covered by a roof of corrugated zinc, they said they had slept in the open air as they rebuilt one house — using straw and branches.

“It took us two months to rebuild because the police kept harassing us,” Ms. Maluleke said.

Some villagers were relieved that the threat from the Mugabes appeared to have passed.

“We’re 100 percent happy,” said Susan Madoka, who lost two small homes to the police this year.

Village leaders, however, were more cautious about the future.

Since seizing Arnolds Farm in 2000, the village’s families have lived as subsistence farmers. Like other Zimbabweans who were given access to land, they did not get the titles necessary to guarantee bank loans. Without these loans, they cannot buy the equipment needed to extricate themselves from subsistence farming — and their dependence on the party that has ruled Zimbabwe since independence.

Mr. Chaparadza, the village leader, said that as part of any resolution of the land issue, the new government should compensate white farmers.

“Even if they come back, that’s fine as long as they give us another place,” he said. “We won’t deny them. What we need is only some land where we can survive — and title to the land.’’

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Land Issue Stands in Zimbabwe’s Path. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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